Whenever I’ve had a really great experience in my life
it has just been me out in nature,
but in my day to day existence I get very, very little of that.
So I think a lot of the work has been about trying to resolve those two things
and how this thing that I want in my life can be applied to
the actual things that are in my life and how I can unify those two things.
I’m Jonathan Zawada and I’m an artist and designer.
Over the years I guess I’ve worked on everything from
music videos and album covers to oil paintings and sculptures,
furniture objects and... sort of anything, anything that I can make.
I feel like an octopus with a lot of tendrils really.
I guess when I was a kid - 15 or even younger, I finally saved up enough money
to get a computer and prior to that I loved drawing and making things all the time.
And getting a computer wasn’t really any different for me
So I think starting quite young with it meant that I never really separated them
into two boxes. And the more I did it the more I felt like separating out one of the
mediums felt sort of unsatisfying. And I guess that just compounded over the years
as technology more and more ubiquitous.
When we moved to America we did this incredible road trip through Yosemite
and to Utah and Nevada and all over the place, and was just blown away by
the incredible vastness and scale and the suddenness of the geography here.
And being from Australia, there’s almost no mountain ranges and so that's
what I was attracted to
I was never much exposed to or interested in flowers
until I would repeatedly be punished for giving them the wrong name.
Annie would be so unimpressed when I would name a geranium a gladiola or something
but I’m educating myself now and I’ve gotten quite into the whole process
so I guess something like the Flume project has been… I really connected to that.
All of the texturing and all of the colouration and everything in that is done procedurally
as well, so that’s all node structures and mini little algorithms that generate the
appearance of partly what the petal is and also the tiny little disturbances
on the surface are.
There’s kind of a mathematics aspect to it that I find validates that
that makes it not this airy fairy, I love nature kind of thing.
but you know, digging a little deeper into aspects of fractal growth and stuff like that.
There’s a different way of approaching that stuff which is like hand painting those things
and feeding them in, but it doesn't - that feels like cheating to me.
To start with something as tiny as some numbers and plugging them together,
that feels real, you know?
As that kind of gathered steam, the label and Harley were keen for me to be involved in
translating that into live show stuff.
Just these really flights of fancy kind of responses to the music
weaponry that’s all been quite defaced and then turns into gold that melts
Our son has a genetic condition called Potocki-Shaffer Syndrome
which is a genetic deletion so he was slow to develop
Prior to him being born I had sort of had this real fascination with science
and to a limited extent replaced that religion slot in my brain
and I thought it was all amazing and all incredibly interesting
but after he was diagnosed I ended up just being frustrated at that and kind of angered
by it - angered at the abstraction of science and how far away from the reality it was.
So, since that point I’ve focused more on just what is innately, humanly interesting
in a visceral response kind of way.
After he was diagnosed I did these mesh pieces that are just -
they don’t do anything other than be arresting
So I think a lot of the time my work is just trying to create something that I feel
like is valid conceptually and has that to it, but if you walk into a room
you can just enjoy looking at it at the same time.
The Mark Pritchard release from this year on Warp was the first time ever
that I’ve really felt like I was just collaborating in a genuinely, creatively fulfilling way.
I love it mostly because he loves it so much as well and he supported me and argued
with the label about it and maintained this vision that I vaguely thought I wanted to do
but I was never quite sure and he helped me feel like “no that is exactly what I want to do"
So that feels like it’s probably the strongest...
one of the strongest pieces of work that I’ve done.
It’s really exciting making stuff now
I think I’ve given up on thinking of myself as an artist or a designer
and I think I just like making stuff.
Tech - we talk about it like it’s something else and really now, it’s all just that same thing
it’s part of the world and part of the fabric of the world
it’s not an other thing.